


Ces choses, elles prennent du temps

by blacklaces



Series: Café Alrededor del Mundo [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Aftermath of WWII, Angst, Author's intense love affair with coffee, Author's intense love affair with food, Coffee, Historical References, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Japan, Japanese Culture, Mentioned: Nagasaki Bombing, Multi, Post-Canon, Quynh & Booker's Excellent Adventure, Tea, The Inherent Trauma of the Modern World, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:40:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25516669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blacklaces/pseuds/blacklaces
Summary: They tool around Tokyo for days. Quynh uses the time to relearn Japanese. Booker uses the time to relearn how to make Sake. The two things are not the same.orQuynh and Booker in many Japanese cafes
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Quynh | Noriko, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Café Alrededor del Mundo [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1846708
Comments: 24
Kudos: 278





	Ces choses, elles prennent du temps

**Author's Note:**

> Ces choses, elles prennent du temps- These things, they take time

Inevitably, they end up in Japan. Booker would not be dissuaded and Quynh needs to acquaint herself with more unsavory characters of the modern world if she is to move her plan forward. She’s heard great things about the Yakuza. 

Her time spent integrating herself into the framework of Japan’s criminal underground keeps getting interrupted though. Booker takes her on a tour of what seems to be every coffee shop in the country, showing her his old and new favorites alike. 

Quynh doesn’t know if he’s trying to distract her, completely throwing himself into her cause, or buying himself time before he does- _something_. Quynh thinks it’s probably the latter.

He takes her to the smallest, cheapest place in Tokyo the moment they get off the plane. Quynh hated every minute of being boxed up in an economy seat for the 5 hours from Hanoi to Tokyo, but the iced coffee he places in her hand once they get through customs and out on the street almost makes up for it. The bittersweet taste that blooms in her mouth is a work of art more beautiful than anything that ever decorated the walls of the Forbidden City. The coffee is strong; if Yusuf was with her, he’d know how to perfectly describe it, but for now Quynh settles on the word _ambition_.

Booker and her sit on padded booths with striped upholstery as they sip their drinks. He makes a game of it- trying to get her to guess every component of the coffee. She thinks she’s gotten it right when she says Brazillian, until Booker smugly informs her the grounds are only half composed of beans from the Western Hemisphere.

“Come on, I believe in you. Where are the other beans from?” His smile is a small thing, fragile and breakable, and Quynh never wants it to wither away, only wants it to grow bigger and stronger. 

After several more minutes of slow, careful sips, she gives up. “I don’t know Sebastien.”

Her visible shock at his answer, Loas, is enough to make his smile light up his eyes. 

-

They tool around Tokyo for days. Quynh uses the time to relearn Japanese. Booker uses the time to relearn how to make Sake. The two things are not the same. 

Quynh spends the nights terrorizing streets and shops until she draws the attention of the Yazkuza bosses in the city. 

Booker spends the days taking her to every shop he can find. Their third day in the city he takes her to a franchised cafe of all things, but the cheese tart there is the best thing Quynh’s ever tasted, and they drink their house-made cold brew from champagne glasses. 

“Kan Pai.” Booker says, raising his glass to her. 

“Kan Pai.” Quynh repeats, clinking the rim of her glass to his. The sharp sound gets lost in the bustle around them, and for a moment they're just two travelers in a cafe in Tokyo.

For lunch, Booker brings her to Musee du Chocolat Theobroma in the Shibuya City district of Tokyo. Because of course the Frenchman finds the French-trained pastry chefs in Japan. Quynh thinks several ill thoughts in the general direction of France, and wonders if this could have been possibly avoided by poisoning one of the various King Louis’ in their cribs. 

She takes back every ill wish against the Kings Louis when their food is brought to them. The chocolate cake that Booker raved about on their walk there, the San Joaquin Dos, is everything he promised and more. She samples the apricot and strawberry custard pudding along with the Mont Blanc, washing it down with delicious cocoa tea and bubbly champagne. Booker regales her with tales of his escapades from his various trips to Japan, including one where he accidentally insulted the emperor and had to flee the Tokyo Imperial Palace through the garbage chute. 

“No!” she exclaims. 

“Yes! I’m not lying!” Booker is effusive in his grace, four glasses of champagne consumed during their faux-lunch. It’s the most fun Quynh’s had in ages. 

Later on, Quynh gets her meeting with Tokyo’s Yakuza elite. Unfortunately, some don’t heed her gracious, even favorable, terms. Five minutes after that, their underbosses readily agree to her terms, faces dappled with the blood of their former bosses. Booker raises an eyebrow when he sees her next, dried blood on the ends of sleeves, but she just motions for him to follow her out of the hotel. Together, they wind their way through Tokyo’s nightlife and metro before they reach their destination. Cafe Elementary School is just minutes away from Shibuya station. The menus are cute, printed on old Japanese attendance books, and the coffee is perfect. 

“Fruity.” She says. 

Booker looks at her, questioning. 

“Floral, chocolate, and- blueberry.” She guesses. She’s right, she knows it, but something painful flashes across Booker’s face. 

“Sebastien?”

“It’s-” he starts then stops. “It’s something we used to do, with Andy. Nicky would buy baklava from, just anywhere, and she would always guess the flavors and where it was from. She got it right everytime.”

It’s interesting, how the Andromache Booker knows is similar and dissimilar to the one she knew. She makes a non-committal noise into her mug. Unbidden, memories rise up in the back of her mind. She used to do the same thing with Andromache too. Raided caravans on the Silk Road just to look for the newest spice to present Andromache with, but never being able to surprise her. _Stop it!_ , she tells herself. Every memory of Andromache dredges up emotions that Quynh has been trying to forget she has. Booker, sensing her turmoil, gladly offers up a distraction.

The last thing he needs is Quynh losing it in one of the world’s most prominent cities. 

“You know the first coffee shop opened in Japan in 1888.”

“Oh”, Quynh says, silently prompting him to continue.

“It lasted 5 years before going bankrupt, and I don’t know of another one until the 20th century.”

He sets his mug down. 

“It was banned during the second world war- to foreign, to western. It got popular again during the ‘60s, and now you have what exists today. It’s funny, they say that either the Dutch or the Portuguese first brought coffee into the country in the 1700’s, but Nicky claimed that is was really him and Joe when-”

He cuts himself off. Silently, he picks up the mug and stares into it, lost to a memory. Quynh rages. She rages at everything: life that continued while she died over and over again, at Nicolò and Yusuf for being happy, at Andromache for leaving her, at her companion, dear Sebastien le Livre, who dreamed about her for 200 years, for living in the past while the present is right across the table from him. She stands up suddenly, knocking her chair back as she disappears into the Tokyo night. 

It takes the death of 20 men- abusers, rapists, and sex traffickers- to calm her down. She comes into contact with Chinese Triad members as she cleans off her knife after the last death. He’s smarter than his Japanese counterparts were, agreeable where they were not, and that night Quynh ends up with the Triad and the Chinese Dragons at her disposal. Funny how things work out. When she goes back to the hotel, closer to dawn than midnight, Booker is waiting up for her. Slowly, he hands her a box of Mango cake as an apology. 

They leave Tokyo at first light. 

-

In Osaka, Booker follows her into the Kamagasaki slums. She loses him in the rundown buildings, threading in and out between the day laborers and those waiting in line for handed out rations. It disgusts her, that these slums co-exist next to dizzying feats of modernity and success. She almost feels bad about it about ditching Booker, but better to not have his conscious weighing on her as she plans mass murder. She wonders if she should bring him into the fold, try harder at convincing him that what she’s doing is right, that they weren’t doing their duty enough. How could anyone look around and think there is justice in the world?

When she exits the restaurant basement where the meeting between herself and the other organizations was held, she doesn’t see Booker at first. It takes movement out of the corner of her eye to see him. He sits with his back against the wall of a street corner, passing his flasks back and forth. The men he’s talkin with are old (young, barely a life at all), white at their temples with haggard faces. One of them sits a little ways from the rest, a wracking cough shaking his frame every few breaths. 

Booker looks up at her when she steps out from the shadows and into the spillage of light from a nearby street lamp. There’s hardly any women around; Quynh, in her scarlet dress, young and beautiful, stands out against the lucky men who received a ticket for a night in a warm shelter. He moves to get up, clapping the men on the shoulder in goodbye. The Yen and sake he leaves behind are appreciated by the men, if the good natured yelling is anything to go by. He spends a few extra moments with the man with the cough, handing him extra cash and, if Quynh hears right, pleads for him to visit the nearest hospital.

When he walks up to her she asks, “Who are those men?” 

“Men.” he replies, as if that’s helpful. “Laborers and construction workers down on their luck.” 

“And him?” she tilts her head in the direction of the coughing man, wrapped up in a tartan blanket.

“Tuberculosis.”

Quynh wonders how Booker can exist in this world, where misery exists in the middle of affluence. 

“He doesn’t want to go to a hospital?”

The look on Booker’s face is brittle. “He’s like me.” he says. “He wants to die.” Booker takes a sharp turn to the right, and for the first time he is the one who leaves her behind. 

-

She terrifies him, this woman who poured herself a glass of water during their first meeting.

She’s angry at the world- this warrior woman of myth who overthrew dynasties. There’s a kinship between the two of them because of it, but where Booker's anger has always been entwined with grief, Quynh’s anger is entangled with rage. A monsoon at its most ferocious, a fire that burns through an entire forest. He wonders how she can look around at the misery in the middle of affluence and think it all needs to burn down. For the longest time, Booker has been apathetic to the world, only reconnecting with it at the behest of Andy, Joe, and Nicky. London though, London _(and Nile)_ opened his eyes. He no longer wants to stand apart from the world, but rather in it. He wants to help and provide justice the right way. In a way that heals. 

Like Andy said, he’s been doing a shit job of living- he won’t let Quynh walk down the same path he did. 

-

Determined to make something of Osaka, Booker does two things the next morning. First he brings Quynh back to Kamagasaki, carrying enough blank checks between the two of them to cover the shelters’ operating costs for the year in full. Second, he brings his slightly deranged and highly murderous companion to The Münch. He feels slightly guilty as he opens the door for Quyhn, but makes a bargain with himself. If drinking $900 coffee and snacking on chocolate opera cake makes her slightly less willing to burn the world down, he figures it’s worth it (even if it could be considered a waste of money).

The bell over the door rings as they walk in. The inside is warm compared to the brisk air outside. It was only a 10 minute walk from Takayasu Station, but Quynh is welcome to be out of the elements. The shop is small but uncrowded, the only others being an old man and a young couple in the back. The two sit down at the table closest to the mounted motorcycle, which Quynh can’t believe is acceptable decoration. After so many years at the bottom of the sea, she finds this new world very strange. 

The old man, who Booker informs her is the owner, makes his way over to them. Booker orders two cups of what Quynh loosely translates as barrel-aged iced coffee, 22 years-old. The man nods, and walks away. Quynh looks over at Booker. 

“Sebastien, what did you just order?”

In the background, the soft _whir_ of the grinder comes to life. 

“Just, trust me.” He says. 

Quynh almost scoffs. Trust? What is trust to a woman that predates the word itself, what is trust to a woman abandoned, to someone planning on getting even ( _betraying_ , her traitorous mind whispers) with the very people she once considered family? She takes a moment, and realizes she’s overthinking it. It’s just coffee. 

It’s just coffee, until it turns out to not, in fact, be just coffee. 

The old man carefully brings over two cups with a swirling dark liquid inside. Booker’s cup is plain ceramic, but hers is a hand-painted beauty, the gold gilt glittering in the low lighting. He explains the process, from raw beans to the fine ground, and then leaves them to it. Quynh takes a moment to enjoy the sweet smell that emanates from it. When she lifts the cup up to her mouth and takes the first sips, Quynh almost expects Nicolò and Yusuf’s angels to come down from the heavens. The coffee is so sweet it’s almost like a syrup. It tastes like wine and chocolate and something indescribable- happiness. She drinks slowly to savor every sip; it’s like nothing she’s ever tried before. Booker grins at her over his own cup. Quynh figures he wins this round. 

She almost takes it back when she sees the bill. 

“2000 dollars for 2 cups of coffee!” she hisses to Booker, careful to not be heard by the others in the cafe. “What were you thinking? What was he thinking?” 

She takes a moment to spare a look at who she thought was just a normal old man, but is now clearly someone who’s crazier than even her. 

“Chill.” Booker says. He looks entirely too pleased with himself. Quynh’s going to smother him in his sleep. Pity it won’t take. 

-

All the coffee in the world however, pales in comparison to the perfectly brewed cup of coconut oolong she has in Nagasaki. It’s different, this city. Radically modern compared to the Eternal City that is Tokyo. 

She burns, almost lights herself on fire with the rage coming from her skin when she thinks about the destruction that caused half a city to be built anew. Booker, seeing the look in her eye, drags her from the city center to a bridge overlooking the bay but devoid of tourists. 

Tears gather in the corner of her eyes. She can’t imagine the aftermath. The emotion claws at her throat and grasps at her heart. It’s a reality check, one that hits her so hard she reaches out and grabs the railing of the bridge to keep herself upright. The pain is not unlike watching Lykon die. Booker lays a hand on her shoulder, but she shakes it off.

“Quynh” he asks, quiet and careful, like he is handling an unstable explosive. The irony isn’t lost on Quynh.

“I’m fine.” She says. She’s not. How can she be?

She looks out over and across the bay, at a city where only half of it dates back to before 1945- a blink of an eye to Quynh. Her resolve starts to crack, a small fracture, almost unnoticeable. She takes a moment to vow that she will be more precise in her destruction. She’ll never subject the masses to anything like what she witnesses, what they’ve witnessed. Quynh was the victim of uncaring justice, the heavy hand of sentencing that didn’t care if innocents got caught up in the chaos. She won’t perpetuate it. 

“I’m fine.”

Booker walks them to the nearest, emptiest cafe, and the two over them sit out on the patio, _over_ the water _._ The server brings out a tray balancing two pots and two cups, with a small slice of pineapple cake for each of them. It’s peaceful.

-

Quynh, in her late night digs through the internet, finds a place where people can take baths in coffee, tea, wine, or sake filled hot springs. Booker says no so quickly and adamantly, and looks so singularly offended that Quynh’s first death on land in 500 years comes from choking on her own laughter.

**Author's Note:**

> "Kan Pai" is the Japanse-language equivalent to "Cheers!"  
> While coffee was introduced to Japan in the early 1700's, the first coffee shop wasn't established until 1888. Coffee was banned during the second world war and didn't become popular again until the 1960s.  
> All the cafes mentioned in the work all real places! Big thanks to the show "Worth It" for introducing all the different places to me.  
> I think that Quynh is still primarily a product of her time. When she was dropped in the ocean, humanity couldn't inflict anywhere near the amount of damage that Nagasaki and Hiroshima had from American bombing, and I think her realizing that is a realistic way for her to start coming to terms with her own personal trauma and the trauma she wants to inflict.  
> If there's anything that needs correction, please let me know!
> 
> As always, find me on tumblr at [Blacklaces!](https://blacklaces.tumblr.com/)


End file.
